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Future of my support for ATI

07-30-2008, 03:20 PM

I've had an X1650 for nearly a year now. I've watched update after update for windows XP and Vista. I've installed update after update for Ubuntu and basic Debian lenny. I've heard promises and more promises from ATI. I've heard there is an ATI representative reading here. Hopefully you hear this, and pass it on.

For me It comes to this, support Linux or I'll never purchase another ATI or AMD product again.

I think the lack of good working 3D support, including VIDEO PLAYBACK in Linux is a political move to do as much as possible to prevent Linux from flourishing more than it has, especially as a desktop operating system.

It's no secret Microsoft is threatened by Linux from a marketing viewpoint but it makes no sense that a hardware manufacturer would drag their feet this much in providing full support for an obviously flourishing operating system like Linux. I have no doubt this is not a technical issue, it's a political issue and in not solving it you've tried to moved the issues with Microsoft to the desktop of those who want to get rid of their dependence on a single company for all their software needs. Watching this card perform in Vista compared to Ubuntu makes me ill...

Windows is supposed to be an OPERATING system, not an EMPIRE system. It's now become an application restriction system. it's supposed to provide an environment to support those products I choose to purchase and install on MY COMPUTER HARDWARE, not limit my choices to ONLY MICROSOFT products or those products that have the "stamp of approval" from Bill Gates.

So, ATI / AMD, by not FULLY supporting the fastest growing operating system in existence while at the same time providing outstanding support for Microsoft based products, I have to assume there is some kind of collusion between AMD and Microsoft and that means you are aware of the issues and that you've chosen to try to support the ONE SIZE FOR ALL approach to computing based on attempting to control what I do with the hardware I've purchased.

What are you all going to do when hardware contains it's own software?
Why do we even need to "install" a driver. Why can't the industry agree to create a common hardware video language and then embed the whole thing on a chip so we don't need software drivers at all. Why is Microsoft even involved in writing or installing code that supports a hardware video device? Why does Microsoft have anything at all to do with hardware drivers? It's sheer insanity, unless you think about the marketing implications of loosing "control" of the hardware industry.

Seems the limiting factors in this industry are no longer technical restrictions but fear based, politically motivated, marketing driven, user manipulation and it's ME, the purchaser of the hardware that looses. And that bugs me.

Eventually you'll have to make a choice. Hardware that is dependent on a specific operating system significantly limits the scope of it's use. At present Microsoft is the largest "application software distributor", and both XP and Vista are applications, not operating environments, but they won't be forever. The more they try to control what software I install and use, the less enticing their products become and the more their market share drops... How many times has Microsoft been sued for breach of contract or unfair business practices. Does anybody remember Netscape?

I've had an X1650 for nearly a year now. I've watched update after update for windows XP and Vista. I've installed update after update for Ubuntu and basic Debian lenny. I've heard promises and more promises from ATI. I've heard there is an ATI representative reading here. Hopefully you hear this, and pass it on.

I think the lack of good working 3D support, including VIDEO PLAYBACK in Linux is a political move to do as much as possible to prevent Linux from flourishing more than it has, especially as a desktop operating system.

What aspect of the 3D support are you unhappy with ? We are still shaking some issues out of the new 3D code base but I think the stack is running pretty well other than (ahem) Windows apps under Wine.

The only other 3D issue I can think of is running 3D apps under Compiz, where NVidia has an advantage because they didn't rely on the Linux framework and instead ported relatively more of their Windows driver stack to Linux allowing them to support Redirected Direct Rendering before Intel and AMD.

Regarding video playback, have you tried the open source drivers on your 1650 recently ? Alex put a lot of work into adding good EXA render support and Textured Video (which works nicely even under Compiz) and that is now available on both the radeonhd and radeon drivers. The only missing thing in the framework right now is a good vsync solution in the compositor but that is being worked on.

It's no secret Microsoft is threatened by Linux from a marketing viewpoint but it makes no sense that a hardware manufacturer would drag their feet this much in providing full support for an obviously flourishing operating system like Linux. I have no doubt this is not a technical issue, it's a political issue and in not solving it you've tried to moved the issues with Microsoft to the desktop of those who want to get rid of their dependence on a single company for all their software needs. Watching this card perform in Vista compared to Ubuntu makes me ill...

I would say Microsoft is threatened more by Apple on the desktop than by Linux. Have you seen a 1650-class ATI GPU running on a Mac ?

It's going to be another 6-12 months before the Linux desktop infrastructure is going to be ready to start taking on Apple and Microsoft, but there is great progress and solutions seem to be worked out for all the key parts. Again, you want to be running the open drivers to see the framework progress fastest -- while you want to run our proprietary drivers if you want to see proprietary features first. Up to you.

Windows is supposed to be an OPERATING system, not an EMPIRE system. It's now become an application restriction system. it's supposed to provide an environment to support those products I choose to purchase and install on MY COMPUTER HARDWARE, not limit my choices to ONLY MICROSOFT products or those products that have the "stamp of approval" from Bill Gates.

I think Bill would disagree with you. Windows is the foundation of a very successful empire

So, ATI / AMD, by not FULLY supporting the fastest growing operating system in existence while at the same time providing outstanding support for Microsoft based products, I have to assume there is some kind of collusion between AMD and Microsoft and that means you are aware of the issues and that you've chosen to try to support the ONE SIZE FOR ALL approach to computing based on attempting to control what I do with the hardware I've purchased.

I think the fastest growing OS right now is OS/X and AFAIK we do fully support it. We also are steadily improving our Linux support. Sorry, but you have to admit you set yourself up for that one

What are you all going to do when hardware contains it's own software? Why do we even need to "install" a driver. Why can't the industry agree to create a common hardware video language and then embed the whole thing on a chip so we don't need software drivers at all. Why is Microsoft even involved in writing or installing code that supports a hardware video device? Why does Microsoft have anything at all to do with hardware drivers? It's sheer insanity, unless you think about the marketing implications of loosing "control" of the hardware industry.

The short answer is that the common video languages change significantly every couple of years as it becomes possible to make more sophisticated hardware. I joined ATI about 10 years ago and graphics hardware has perhaps 2,000 times the processing power it did when I joined -- and I joined ATI because there had been such incredible advances BEFORE that relative to my first stint in graphics processors.

That said, since you are unhappy with Microsoft and (reading between the lines) Digital Rights Management, that is something different (and a different part of the chip as well). Again, though, the advances in video processing power over the last decade are pretty significant as well, although maybe only 100:1 rather than 2,000:1.

Seems the limiting factors in this industry are no longer technical restrictions but fear based, politically motivated, marketing driven, user manipulation and it's ME, the purchaser of the hardware that looses. And that bugs me.

Go work for a hardware vendor. We still have lots of technical challenges

Eventually you'll have to make a choice. Hardware that is dependent on a specific operating system significantly limits the scope of it's use. At present Microsoft is the largest "application software distributor", and both XP and Vista are applications, not operating environments, but they won't be forever. The more they try to control what software I install and use, the less enticing their products become and the more their market share drops... How many times has Microsoft been sued for breach of contract or unfair business practices. Does anybody remember Netscape?

Yep. Rough numbers right now - Microsoft 90% and dropping, Apple 7% and growing fairly quickly, Linux <1% and growing fairly slowly. We think Linux can grow faster if more vendors help it along and we're trying to do just that.

As long as we offer a good range of alternative choices (MacOS, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD today, if you include the open drivers) I have to say "yes". Microsoft have done a lot of good things for the PC market as well, although you may not agree with all of their decisions, but there are alternatives and Linux is not the only one.

I understand that Microsoft OSes are not your choice and we are not trying to force you to use their products.

Comment

So, ATI / AMD, by not FULLY supporting the fastest growing operating system in existence while at the same time providing outstanding support for Microsoft based products, I have to assume there is some kind of collusion between AMD and Microsoft and that means you are aware of the issues and that you've chosen to try to support the ONE SIZE FOR ALL approach to computing based on attempting to control what I do with the hardware I've purchased.

As I said in another post, when my system died and I needed to buy a new computer, I went with an all-AMD platform (including a Radeon HD4850) solely based on the dump of technical information AMD has provided the open-source community for previous cores.

If AMD did nothing from now on, the open-source community has enough to keep them busy for a long time developing a really good open-source driver, and that's where you get to the difference between Windows / Mac OS and Linux. With Windows/Mac, when you buy a new Radeon, you buy it so you can get more/prettier FPS in games, and that's about it. When it breaks or the vendor decides you need to pay them some more, you buy something else. You don't care if it's killing kittens underneath your case or scanning your blood for compatibility with the new Vampire Alien Overlords, and the vendor doesn't care if it really works or not as long as they get sales.

With Linux, you're buying a great bit of hardware with processing cores and RAM and buses capable of unbelievable computing feats, the most obvious of which are more / prettier FPS in games. If it breaks, you can fix it. If it's killing kittens under your case, you can stop it. If you're making money off it, you can pay someone to fix it for you. In the end, it makes the kitten-killing Windows/Mac setup look pretty worthless, and that's something AMD has cottoned onto. With something as complex as a modern graphics card, the only way you're going to get instant value out of a new product is with great documentation and a great vendor-supplied open-source driver as a starting point for the community. Unfortunately, AMD've still got a lot of momentum with the closed-source world, and practically, they're making more money from content Windows users, so that's where sad compromises like binary blobs (with video tearing that don't run Wine) and a closed-source AtomBIOS come in.

It's crap, I know, but since nVidia are very closed-source, you have the choice between something that will eventually be a very good fit with Linux/open source, or something that will always be pretty good at pretending, and will always be limiting what you can do with it.

Comment

Oooh, are they numbers you're working with internally? If so, do you think they take into account things like dual-boot systems and Wine reporting it's Windows?

This is my recollection of numbers from a couple of months ago. There are several different information sources (including things like browser hits on a broad range of web sites) which all seem to give roughly the same results. AFAIK dual-booting would result in a hit for both OSes (which would tend to slightly favour Linux by pushing the numbers towards 50/50). I don't think we have any game stats since so few games "phone home" under Linux, so Wine users would only get credited as Windows if, for example, they were choosing to run IE under Wine rather than running a native browser.

We did open up the atombios parser and bytecode language at the start of the project. The source code is 1:1 identical to the bytecode in the ROM (ie printing the command tables as bytecodes gives you something identical to the original source code), and all of the information you need to do that has been available for a year, so it would be a bit of a philosophical stretch to call it closed source.

Comment

Tagging game hits would be stupid. Most vendors ( *cough*valve sucks*cough* ) actively deny doing linux clients and do there best to make it not work in wine ( if it does not work in wine it is to a large degree a programmer with his head stuck in his arse strangling the W32 API into doing something it is not meant to be used for ). Wine is anyways not the future... crossplatform game engines are the future. The rest is just a vain attempt at fighting symptoms instead of solving the underlaying problem.